Justin B. Litke: Twilight of the Republic: Empire and Exceptionalism in the American Political Tradition. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2013.
This lively scholarly polemic takes what is often called a ‘paleoconservative’ view of American political history. American conservatism generally opposes progressivism (latterly called liberalism) in affirming what Russell Kirk called the permanent things—first of all the Biblical God, but also the traditional customs following from God’s commandments and “the laws of Nature and of Nature’s God” inherent in His creation. Paleoconservatives typically differ from other conservatives in denying universal natural rights, damning these as dangerous ‘abstractions’ tending toward all things violent and French. Professor Litke follows this line, celebrating John Winthrop’s Puritan founding at Massachusetts Bay, downplaying the Founders’ claim that all men are created equal, and above all by charging Abraham Lincoln with a sort of political heresy in emphasizing precisely that ‘abstract’ claim—and thereby derailing the Winthropian-Christian American tradition while preparing for the universalist/imperialist claims of Albert Beveridge’s Progressivism.
He begins with a factual error, and an important one: “From colonial times up to the turn of the twentieth century, the country’s particular way of acting both domestically and in foreign affairs was fairly circumscribed and inwardly focused.” This is simply and obviously wrong. The period 1791-1890 saw American imperialism at its apex, as Americans moved from the Atlantic to the Pacific coast, pushing Amerindian nations and tribes westward at first, then into small settlements where many of them remain to this day, effectively protectorates of their conquerors. It is true that Americans undertook overseas expansion after 1890, but Hawaii and Puerto Rico scarcely compare to the lands acquired before that, and Americans proceeded with their planned relinquishment of Cuba and the Philippines as soon as they had some assurance that no other world power would take them.
Nonetheless, Litke accurately observes that Progressivism marks a sharp turn away from the principles of the Founders. What happened?
He begins with “the problem of American exceptionalism,” a phrase Walter Sombart coined in 1906 as he wondered why an advanced capitalist country seemed immune from socialism. Today, Litke remarks, the phrase has two meanings. In its comparative-politics sense, it refers to Sombart’s question. The United States deviates from the pattern of economic, social, and political development expected by Marx, who posits historical ‘stages’ consisting of feudalism, capitalism, socialism, and finally communism, all determined by struggles between economic classes. Since Marxism itself has taken a beating in the past thirty years or so, this meaning of exceptionalism no longer prevails. Rather, exceptionalism now refers to uniqueness. Unlike other ‘advanced’ countries, Americans remain in large measure a religious people, even if their religiosity has declined in the past 100 years. Following from this religiosity, Americans describe themselves as exceptional in three ways, considering themselves as exemplary in proving it possible to follow the Christian way of life in modernity, in maintaining political and social institutions that differ from those widely established elsewhere, and in undertaking a mission to civilize, educate, “or otherwise dominate the world politically or economically.”
Preliminary to addressing this problem, Litke denies that philosophy understood as the ascent from the cave of custom and opinion is possible. In this he follows such non-Leftist historicist thinkers as Eric Voegelin, Willmoore Kendall, and George Carey, who argue that political philosophy “is a tardy development in the history of a people,” a thing produced out of the customs and opinions of the communities in which it arises. “A purely philosophical method is limited to analysis of particular moments in the life of a people—and late moments at that.” Ideas aren’t ideas in the Platonic or any other sense philosophers defined prior to the very late eighteenth century; rather, they are expressions of “symbols” and “myths” rather than realities above or behind symbols and myths. The claim that philosophizing amounts to a moment assumes what it attempts to prove, namely, that philosophic thought is time-bound or historical. Accordingly, in Litke’s phrase, the judgments of philosophers are really only “judgments of history.” Paleoconservative thought thus combines classical conventionalism with historicist theory, in contradiction to progressivist thought, which combines historicist theory with a vision of a perfected ‘end of history.’ But it shares with the historicism of the Left an egalitarian appeal of its own: Litke seeks “the real political theory of a people,” instead of “merely one person’s political thought,” for “language symbols” “that are not dead letters but sprang forth as active principles of the life of the community.” Not for him the philosophic claim that a thinker can escape the ‘cave.’ The claim also has political consequences; In it one sees the basis of paleoconservative’s hostility to Abraham Lincoln, who understood himself as defending an idea or proposition—that all men are created equal—and not a tradition.
Litke begins with John Winthrop, the governor of the English colony at Massachusetts Bay and often called “the first American exceptionalist” because he calls for the founding of a “city on a hill”—that is, a political community that would stand as an example to the other, erring, communities in the world, somewhat as the Jewish republic stood to the regimes of the Gentiles. “Winthrop’s writings may stand in for the truth of the way of life”—the regime—”at Massachusetts Bay.” That way of life comported with Winthrop’s aristocratic status, his life in the legal profession, and of course his Puritan Christianity; the colony was no democracy, as the franchise and officeholding were restricted the those approved by the church. Itself a product of British imperialism, it furthered that imperial project in its dealings with Amerindians, claiming the hunting lands of local tribes under the principle of vacuum domicilium and fighting a war against the Pequots, whom they scattered or sent to slavery. Litke never quite gets round to mentioning those last couple of points, emphasizing the intended Christian exemplariness of Winthrop’s intention. Indeed so: Winthrop would never have written the letters George Washington later sent to the several religious congregations in the United States, including Catholics and Jews.
Winthrop rather intended, first, to carry the Gospel to the New World as a “bulwark against the kingdom of Antichrist which the Jesuits labor to rear up in those parts” and as a corrective to the Church of England, which, as Litke remarks, “seemed to be edging toward rapprochement with Catholicism.” “The notion that America is a ‘redeemer nation’ need not mean that either the Massachusetts Bay Colony or the United States of America becomes an imperial power.” Indeed not, but they both were, as Litke admits, following Winthrop: “The land in New England lies uncultivated while England’s land groans under the pressure to feed its inhabitants. It would only be right to move westward and improve New England’s unenclosed—and, therefore, free and unclaimed—land; doing so is the act of a good steward of God’s gifts in Creation.” By contrast, the slothful, insufficiently devout Virginians suffered from failing to have established what Winthrop called “a right form of government.” The right form of government must have the right spirit, the spirit of agapic love. Although “it is difficult to imagine even a single fragment of society seeking to live today according to his vision,” it “occupied a prominent place in the American imagination in the early days of the Constitution and during Tocqueville’s time” as “the idea of a Christian political order in America.” As in the early Christian Church, mercy and love were to serve as the bonds of this community, thanks to the grace of God. By creating nature, God made distinctions not only among species but within them; human beings naturally divide into an order of rank. But “His spirit of love,” the “bond of perfection,” brings unity whereby men of diverse and unequal gifts form part of God’s overall plan of salvation.
It is easy to see why this didn’t work, precisely by consulting the Bible. As the epistles of Paul the Apostle show, the early Church had its share of heretics and backsliders. So did Massachusetts Bay, quite apart from those worthless Virginians to the south. The Bible teaches that the Kingdom of God will come only after Jesus’ return and His creation of a new Heaven and a new Earth. Winthrop’s founding may not be utopian (Litke insists it was not), but it was fleeting, and, according to the Bible Winthrop and his associates consulted, it had to be. “We must knit together in this work as one man,” Winthrop urged, but men never do that for long. Winthrop soberly warned against the real danger of such decline, the loss of this Christian example. He depends upon God’s providence to prevent such a calamity; “his theory does not claim to sway history but only to read it and, thus, provide the opportunity to act in accord with it.” The world watches the Puritans, to see if they succeed or fail, he thought. But of course if the world is ‘the world’ in the pejorative sense, then would it not want the Puritans to fail? And would it have heeded their example, had they succeeded? In any event, Litke’s principal claim, that “Puritans were exemplary, not imperial exceptionalists” can only be true if one ignores both their status as a colony and their practice of expansion at the expense of Amerindian hunting grounds.
Although Litke wants to claim that the conception of the American regime the Framers held “was continuous with the Puritans’ in many ways,” he makes it clear that it wasn’t, even in the decades before independence. The covenantal view of “the political order” remained, “taken for granted” by all Americans; yet, it was no longer “a literal covenant with God.” As he observes, representation no longer means a monarch but a republican assembly, and this means a compact or contract with fellow-citizens—under the laws of Nature and of Nature’s God, to be sure, but not with God. As Litke describes the colonial constitutions, prior to the Declaration of Independence, the Articles of Confederation, and the 1787 Constitution, “politics is, under these documents, not considered a grant of the king but an activity of the people themselves for the people’s own benefit.” But this is why they begin to think of political life as contractual, not covenantal.
At any rate, Litke asserts, that the Declaration declares not a revolution but independence. A revolution is a regime change; that being the case, he contends, the Declaration didn’t change the American regime or regimes, which consisted of an alliance of thirteen free and independent states, united only in declaring that independence and in fighting the war under the direction of a Congress consisting of men representing the peoples of those states. This overlooks the Declaration’s clear claim that Americans constitute “a people”—one, not thirteen. It also overlooks the Declaration’s announcement that Americans are changing their government, as indeed they must be, if they no longer recognize the British imperial monarchy but intend to found a federation of republican states. In the name of what did they declare and fight for independence? He claims that although the self-evident truths of equal unalienable rights seem to amount to “universalistic claims” the introductory phrase “We hold these truths…” belies their universality. Litke has confused himself. If I say “I hold that God exists” I may well understand that you don’t, but that doesn’t mean that I am not making a universalistic claim, only that I am not assuming that everyone else concurs with it.
To his credit, Litke sees that there is no “theory of history” in the Declaration. Providence, yes; ‘history,’ no, not in the historicist sense. The Declaration begins “When in the course of events,” not “When in history” because the Founders are natural-rights men, not historicists. “There is no air of inevitability or notion that this move [i.e., declaring independence]is the last, first, or middle term of any inexorable historical syllogism.” In this sense, the Declaration is not universalistic at all. Oddly, Litke identifies only two places in the Declaration that “speak of God,” although there are at least three, implicitly four. God is creator, lawgiver, judge. He is also a providential God, a Person who cares for His creation. True, “Congress acts on the authority of the people it represents,” but the people’s authority derives from their Creator-endowed, self-evident, unalienable rights, shared by all human beings at all times.
This falsifies Litke’s claim that under the Declaration the American people only acted as one people, whereas under the Constitution they are to be one people. The American people declared their union both in the Declaration and before it. What they did in ratifying the Constitution was to re-allocate the powers that belonged to themselves by right, subtracting from the powers they had allocated to the several states and adding to those wielded by the federal government. They did so in order to better secure their unalienable or natural rights, which, the ‘federalists’ saw, were insufficiently protected under the Articles of Confederation.
“The important documents of the American founding have little to say about the place of the American people in history, the universality of their task or aspiration, or the role that God is to play in their polity.” But if ‘history’ means the course of events, the Declaration and other founding documents have plenty to say about Americans’ place in it; only if ‘history’ means a philosophic concept, the unfolding of an ‘Absolute Spirit’ or some other compelling force, do Americans say little—indeed, precisely nothing—about it, inasmuch as they didn’t think in terms of historical laws but rather in terms of the laws of Nature and of Nature’s God. Those laws are universal laws, ruling all human beings as such. As for Providence, the Founders are less presumptuous than the Puritans, relying on God’s blessing but not expecting it. “Transcendence and universality have not been abandoned, but they have been separated out of the political sphere, except at it periphery.” Not quite: they have been separated out of the political sphere as its framework, its standard, and (they hope) its guardian.
As with the Puritans, Litke also claims that the Founders were not imperialists. This is even more obviously wrong than his assertion about the Puritans. Jefferson speaks explicitly about the United States as “an empire of liberty,” and a people’s elected representatives didn’t enact the Northwest Ordinance or the Louisiana Purchase in the absence of imperial ambition. That their imperial ambition differed from European imperial ambitions by proclaiming an empire of liberty, in which new territories would eventually enter the Union as equal partners with the original states and not as perpetual colonies, demonstrates that the Revolutionary War really was revolutionary, a genuine regime change.
It is on this dubious foundation that Litke attacks Lincoln’s “derailment of the tradition”—a tradition that even by his own account does not exist in any but the most general sense, on the level of paleoconservative ‘symbols.’ Lincoln (correctly) identifies the juridical origin of the American Union in the 1774 Articles of Association, but Litke is having none of that, mistakenly claiming that Lincoln presents the several forms of the Union—the 1774 Articles, the Declaration, the Articles of Confederation, the U. S. Constitution—as stages in American political development. “These documents do not enact, reenact, or institute the same political order at their respective moments,” Litke rightly observes, but neither Lincoln nor anyone else ever claimed that they do. Nor does Lincoln make the key historicist move, which is to claim that these ‘moments’ form part of an inevitable unfolding of a ‘historical spirit’ immanent in a process or progression. “If ‘the Union’ came before the Constitution, where did the union come from?” Not “from the Articles of Association of 1774,” as Litke says Lincoln imagined, but from the peoples of the colonies. Can the peoples of former American colonies and territories, now states, dissolve the political Union that organizes them as one people? Of course, and Lincoln never denies it. But the various segments of the American people would need to consent to disunion, even as they consented to Union. In 1774 the newly united people of Great Britain’s North American colonies had not declared their independence; they remained subjects of a monarch in the British Empire, as Litke says. “They wanted continued union with the Crown.” But they were nonetheless united in a new “association” under that Crown. That association asserts rights against the regime of which it is still a part. A people might or might not be sovereign.
“Lincoln is wrong about the United States. The aim of the United States was not at all operatively formulated as a reified proposition until Lincoln did it” in the Gettysburg Address. This is nonsense. The Declaration of Independence enunciates self-evident truths, stated in ‘abstract’ or propositional terms as part of a logical syllogism, with major premises, minor premises, and conclusions drawn from them. If that doesn’t amount to a “reified proposition” (as in a geometric proof or a syllogism), what does? Captive to paleoconservative symbolology, Litke can only look at the “universal or transcendent significance” of the principles or propositions of that syllogism as “a quality previously reserved to the religious sphere in America,” now “infused into the political sphere,” an impetus for a “kind of pseudoreligious mission to be given to government.” “Lincoln is one of the chief sources of what will become the idea of imperial American exceptionalism.” But quite obviously ideas need have no religious or pseudo-religious content; neither Euclid nor Aristotle has recourse to divine revelation. They reason from propositions, as did the Founders and Lincoln, although as political men the Founders and Lincoln also needed to reason practically or prudentially, forming rational policy based on the circumstances before them.
Litke’s final topic, Senator Albert J. Beveridge’s race-theory variant of Progressivism, accurately summarizes Beveridge’s ambition to see an American empire extending not only to the Philippines but to Latin America. Litke ignores the novelty of Progressivism, pretending that “expansion and aggrandizement of American political power is very different from the American political tradition”; what is novel (except among Southern secessionists and some of the older Manifest-Destiny Democrats like Senator Stephen A. Douglas) is the racial and historicist foundation of this new imperialism. Litke further confuses matters by claiming that Beveridge’s position was more or less identical to that of Theodore Roosevelt, who was no racist and had no interest in permanent annexation of foreign territories as colonies. He wrongly exonerates Woodrow Wilson of adherence to ‘race theory,’ but again attempts to add Wilson’s own quite different historicist ‘liberal internationalism’ to more or less the same category as ideas of Lincoln, Beveridge, and Roosevelt: namely, “idealism.” But Lincoln had nothing to do with the historicism propounded by the German Idealists, and until approximately 1911 (that is, after his presidency) Roosevelt had nothing much to do with it, either. [1] “Lincoln made it possible to conceive of America as something transcendent,” but Lincoln claimed no such thing; rather, Lincoln looked to transcendent or abstract principles or self-evident truths (as the Founders had done), truths which, owing to their very transcendence or abstraction, could never be embodied by any political regime, American or other. The embodiment of ideas as ‘ideals’ forms the core of historicism, which Beveridge and Wilson endorsed (albeit in very different ways) and which Lincoln never, and Roosevelt only sometimes, endorsed.
Alluding to Lincoln’s Second Inaugural, Litke writes, “The wounds of the Civil War required bandages not previously known because the war presented a problem—a real disunion—that we had not encountered before.” On the contrary, America’s first civil war, the Revolutionary War, saw the appropriation of the property of American Tories and their departure for Canada and elsewhere in the British Empire. What is more, the real disunion which culminated in both wars arose from a fundamental difference: a dispute over what regime would rule the United States. Monarchy or republic? Oligarchy (as in the slaveholding planters’ South and the Senate they controlled for decades) or republic? Binding up the nation’s wounds was a necessary task at the end of both civil wars. In both cases, new ruling institutions were required in order to buttress the new regime: first the Articles of Confederation and then the Constitution in the founding period, then the Civil War amendments to the Constitution and the attempt to enforce the Constitution’s republican guarantee clause in Reconstruction. (Litke is technically correct in saying that “in Lincoln’s presidency there was no new American political order put in place in an official document,” but only because Lincoln was assassinated before the amendments and Reconstruction took effect.)
“The central question is twofold: first, whether… habits, customs, and institutions [of self-government] may be imposed by a foreign power and, second, whether it is the particular responsibility of the United States to do so. The answer to these questions was formerly settled in an operative no,” an answer supposedly reversed by Beveridge, Roosevelt, and Lincoln, supposedly following Lincoln. The real answer has always been an “operative” and principles “yes,” from the Washington Administration’s efforts to change the regimes of the Five Civilized Tribes in the American South to today. Regime change may indeed be imposed by a victorious power in a just war. The Civil War, World Wars I and II, and several other wars in the course of events involving the United States were just wars undertaken against bad regimes, in many instances regimes which had attacked the United States.
‘Paleoconservative’ historicism provides a sober corrective of ‘progressive’ historicism. Paradoxically, both get ‘history’ wrong. In a conversation with a ‘paleocon’ professor who used a collection of writings for a college reader on “The American Tradition,” I asked, “Who gets to choose what goes into the collection?” He smiled without answering, and understandably so, since he was the editor of the volume in question. Someone always must make the ruling choice, by some set of criteria that amount to ideas, whether they are admitted to be ideas or not. “Permanent things,” indeed.
Note
1. For a comparison of Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and Wilson, see Will Morrisey: The Dilemma of Progressivism: How Roosevelt, Taft, and Wilson Reshaped the American Regime of Self-Government. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2015.
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